The dialectical ghost: W. Shakespeare's text and the Soviet context in G. Kozintsev's Hamlet

This paper discusses a highly renowned film adaptation – G. Kozintsev’s Hamlet. The focus is on The Poetics of Ghosts in G. Kozintsev’s film, an inquiry into the significance of ghostly imagery within the work, the underlying aesthetic ideology, and its historical or contemporary implications. Analyzing this poetic dimension elucidates how G. Kozintsev’s Hamlet gained its contemporaneity within the Soviet Union of the 1960s. Conversely, to understand how this contemporaneity was possible, one must first interpret G. Kozintsev’s poetics of ghosts. These two approaches complement each other.

W. Shakespeare’s plays have been interpreted in various ways on contemporary stages. W. Shakespeare remains a persistent figure in cultural life across all epochs. The Polish W. Shakespeare scholar J. Kott, a contemporary of G. Kozintsev, famously asserted: "Since the end of the eighteenth century no dramatist has had a greater impact on European drama than W. Shakespeare. But the theatres in which W. Shakespeare’s plays have been produced were in turn influenced by contemporary plays. W. Shakespeare has been a living influence in so far as contemporary plays, through which his dramas were interpreted, were a living force themselves. When W. Shakespeare is dull and dead on the stage, it means that not only the theatre but also the plays written in that particular period are dead. This is one of the reasons why W. Shakespeare’s universality has never dated" [7, p. 131].

For J. Kott, W. Shakespeare is perpetually contemporary. If W. Shakespeare loses vitality on stage, it is not he who has become irrelevant, but rather the theater itself that has encountered a crisis. J. Kott asserts that W. Shakespeare's vitality depends on his contemporary interpretation. This principle underpins our analysis of how G. Kozintsev, through the imagery of ghosts, renders Hamlet relevant to the Soviet audience of the 1960s.

The term contemporaneity offers multiple conceptual entry points. A useful distinction may be drawn between immediacy and contemporaneity. While these two terms are easily distinguished in English, in Chinese they share nearly 70 percent of the same components, making their conceptual separation more ambiguous. Immediacy is a theatrical concept, emphasizing the public and present nature of performance. Contemporaneity, by contrast, is relative to past epochs – it functions as a hermeneutic dimension, seeking to bestow contemporary significance upon past dramatic works. Within this framework, the contemporaneity of a classic work precedes its immediacy: first, a director’s interpretation extracts its contemporary aesthetic relevance, and only then does the stage performance generate its immediate theatrical presence. Yet this logic itself warrants critical scrutiny.

To approach G. Kozintsev’s project, one must examine the reception history of Hamlet in Russia. A closer examination reveals two striking periods of silence – the one when Hamlet was not merely absent but prohibited from Russian stages (the reign of Catherine the Great), the other when Hamlet was regarded (though no documentary evidence exists of I.V. Stalin explicitly prohibiting its performance) as the most hated dramatic text for the national leader (the Stalinist era). In both periods, sudden political upheavals marked the national scene: the Orlov Affair and the death of Peter III during Catherine’s rule; the Kirov Affair and the Great Purge during Stalin’s time. These events coincided with intensified ideological control.

During these two periods, Hamlet acquired a narrative of its own. The absence of the play from theatrical life became, paradoxically, a historical performance in itself. By banning Hamlet or regarding Hamlet “in unqualified contempt” [9, p. 103], both Catherine the Great and I. V. Stalin inadvertently enacted Hamlet on the stage of Russian history. The prohibition thus became a performative act – transforming history into theater. This was not merely a history of drama but a drama of history. In this dialectic, Hamlet, removed from theatrical performance, re-entered culture in an unperformable yet interpretively potent form. During these periods, Hamlet became history, and history became Hamlet–thus, Hamlet was «liberated». Crucially, as C. Schmitt demonstrated, the very structure of the play – particularly 'The Mousetrap' – inherently contains a mechanism for such 'historical' readings, which G. Kozintsev masterfully exploited within his post-Stalinist context.

This interplay between theater and reality is directly visible within G. Kozintsev’s adaptation. The most renowned play-within-a-play in theater history is, undoubtedly, Hamlet’s Mousetrap scene (Act III, Scene II). To confirm whether Claudius killed his father, Hamlet stages The Murder of Gonzago to test Claudius’s reaction. Even in the Elizabethan era, this scene was fraught with ambiguity and political subtext. C. Schmitt, in his philological analysis of the scene, introduces the concept of “two taboos”. W. Shakespeare notably omits Gertrude’s reaction to The Mousetrap, prompting C. Schmitt to speculate why her role in the old king’s death is left unclear.

C. Schmitt points out that the prototypes for Gertrude and Hamlet may be Queen Elizabeth I and Prince James of Scotland, respectively. Mary Stuart, James’s mother, had married the presumed murderer of her husband only months after the assassination. In order to protect his mother, James was compelled to prevent an investigation into his father’s death. According to C. Schmitt, this historical parallel corresponds to the “two taboos” in Hamlet. He writes: “The unity of time, place, and plot in this dramatic work is not sealed off; it does not allow for a purely enclosed process to emerge. There are two large openings through which historical time intrudes into theatrical time... These two intrusions – the taboo of concealing the queen’s crime and the distortion of the avenger’s archetypal image, leading to the protagonist’s Hamletization – create two shadows, two points of suspicion.” [10, p. 44].

C. Schmitt insightfully captures the notion that W. Shakespeare’s drama was neither a simple imitation nor a mirror of reality, but an active interpenetration with the sociopolitical realm.

Returning to G. Kozintsev’s film, a similar structural dynamic is evident. In his Mousetrap scene, G. Kozintsev uses W. Shakespeare’s lines verbatim. Before the play begins, Hamlet tells Horatio:

“There is a play to-night before the king;

One scene of it comes near the circumstance

Which I have told thee of my father's death...

Observe mine uncle... If his occulted guilt

Do not itself unkennel in one speech,

It is a damned ghost that we have seen...”[11, p. 86].

Here, Claudius is watching the performance, while Hamlet and Horatio are watching Claudius. In G. Kozintsev’s film, the stage of the acting troupe and Claudius’s viewing platform are positioned directly opposite each other. On the stage is the reenactment of Gonzago’s assassination; on the viewing platform is the psychological reenactment of Claudius’s murder of the old king. The relationship between actor and audience is inverted: the viewer becomes the performer, and the stage becomes a mirror of political truth.

Reflecting on Hamlet’s instructions to Horatio, it becomes clear that the meaning of The Mousetrap depends not on the performance itself but on Claudius’s reaction. If Claudius remains indifferent, the play loses its referential power; if he reacts with anger, Hamlet confirms his interpretation. In this structure of spectatorship, audience response becomes part of the construction of meaning.

It is possible to imagine how Soviet audiences of the 1960s, watching G. Kozintsev’s Hamlet, would have made their own associations. W. Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, argued that modern media deprives traditional art forms of their “aura” [5, p. 299]. Yet might this aura reappear in new forms under contemporary conditions? Soviet audiences, familiar with seeing both Hamlet and Stalin on screen, were engaged in some complex negotiations between art and reality. In this context, the ghost on screen becomes not merely a character but a political symptom.

In his 1966 work W. Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, G. Kozintsev stated that his Hamlet was “a tocsin that awakens the conscience” [8, p. 174]. In the film, even before the ghost’s appearance, Hamlet declares: “Denmark is a prison.” After the king’s death, Elsinore becomes a fortress of surveillance and intrigue. G. Kozintsev, being a witness of Stalinist repression, unmistakably embeds references to contemporary Soviet life. Hamlet, returning from Wittenberg, is summoned by the ghost to “set right the time in Denmark.” In G. Kozintsev’s version, this call becomes a political summons. Following the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, Soviet intellectuals sought to rectify the distortions of the Stalin era, A. Anikst captured the affinity between Hamlet and this new era: Hamlet “corresponded to the mood of society in the country, intensely engrossed in a decisive struggle against evil and injustice in our life” («…это отвечало общественным настроениям в стране, ринувшейся в решительную борьбу против зла и несправедливости в нашей жизни») [1, p. 97].

In G. Kozintsev’s film, the Ghost embodies this dual restoration: its spectral presence demands revenge as personal catharsis (poetic justice for the murdered king), while its haunting call to 'set right the time' resonates as a collective revolutionary imperative – the restoration of V. Lenin’s shattered ideal. For G. Kozintsev’s, a committed Marxist, the task of his Hamlet was clear: to unearth Lenin’s legacy from beneath the institutional changes of that time. This act of artistic creation becomes both revenge and revolution.

Thus, we return to the poetics of ghosts. In Western intellectual tradition, the figure of the ghost functions on two levels: W. Shakespeare’s ghost and C. Marx’s ghost. The first is a summons to revenge; the second, to revolution. In English, both words begin with re-, a prefix signaling return or restoration. Revenge restores poetic justice; revolution restores the ideal. In G. Kozintsev’s Hamlet, the ghosts of W. Shakespeare and Marx coexist.

This study ultimately approaches a New Historicist framework. The dialectic of New Historicism is precisely the dialectic between text and history: Hamlet, as a literary text, possesses historicity, while Soviet reality, as history, possesses textuality. Kozintsev’s Hamlet participates in the 1960s thaw and in the intellectual endeavors of Soviet culture. Conversely, Soviet history permeates the fissures of stage and screen. Once narrated, history becomes a text – open to interpretation, influence, and construction. This is where Hamlet’s contemporaneity emerges. G. Kozintsev’s Hamlet, as a theatrical text, and Soviet reality, as a historical text, together enable W. Shakespeare’s renewal on the Soviet stage of the 1960s. “G. Kozintsev’s active, crusading Hamlet also subverts Soviet tyranny, especially that experienced under Stalin, thereby wresting historical-political agency from not only a pre-revolutionary monarchy, but also from Soviet-style state-engineered forgetfulness” [6, p. 93]. In this context Hamlet’s pathological cry is not the symptom of a disturbed mind but a collective catharsis – a release from the madness of an entire century. It should be noted that coincidentally there are claims suggesting that I. V. Stalin's death may not have been natural but an assassination carried out as part of a secret plan codenamed 'Hamlet' [2].

The poetics of ghosts in G. Kozintsev's Hamlet illustrates how a classical text can be revitalized under new historical conditions. Through the imagery of ghosts, the director not only follows W. Shakespeare but also reinterprets him through the lens of Marxist critique, transforming the film into the "conscience of the era." This research opens avenues for further study of Soviet adaptations of classics as a form of political art.

Renowned W. Shakespeare scholar A. A. Lipgart proposed three methods for the philological analysis of Shakespeare's works: "1) lexico-syntactic analysis, 2) the method of historical-philological reconstruction, and 3) the biographical method of analyzing literary texts” («лексико-синтаксический анализ, метод историко-филологической реконструкции и биографический метод анализа художественных текстов») [3, p. 85]. Expanding the second method proposed by professor A. A. Lipgart, an interdisciplinary New Historicist method can be further developed. This approach treats both Shakespeare's drama itself and the historical context of its performance as "texts," which together realize the contemporary relevance of Shakespearean drama.

On the basis of Grigori Kozintsev's film Hamlet (1964) a fresh perspective for studying Shakespearean texts can be offered as an independent research direction. This approach focuses on:

1. Text adaptation in visual art.
2. Political interpretation through cinematic language.
3. Dialogue between eras.
4. The role of the audience.

This direction complements A. A. Lipgart's methods by introducing an interdisciplinary approach, where philology interacts with film studies, history, and political theory. It is particularly valuable for exploring how classical texts gain new life in modern media and how art becomes a tool for ideological critique.

Future research might explore how this model of politically-charged adaptation manifests in other Soviet-era Shakespeare productions, or investigate parallels with contemporary global cinema (or theatre) that uses Shakespeare to address post-colonial realities [4]. Kozintsev's Hamlet ultimately reminds us that truly great adaptations don't merely interpret their source texts - they complete them by revealing dimensions that only new historical contexts can illuminate.